ered, with all the clarity I
could command. In a second, I perceived the advisability of throwing
the blame upon some other person."

The faces of Braceway and Fulton mirrored to the others the horror of the
stuff they were reading. The scene taxed the emotional balance of all of
them. The evil-faced man at the typewriter, the father getting by degrees
the description of his daughter's death, the policemen waiting to put the
murderer behind bars----

Abrahamson, peculiarly wrought upon by the tenseness of it all, wished he
had not come. His back felt creepy. He lit a cigarette, puffed it to a
torch and threw it down.

Bristow wrote on:

"Mechanically, my fingers went to a pocket in my vest and played with
two metal buttons I had picked up in my kitchen the day before,
Monday.

"I knew the buttons had come from the overalls of the negro, Perry
Carpenter. It would be easy to drop one there, the other on the floor
of my kitchen, where I had originally found them.

"That would be the beginning of identifying him as the murderer. He had
been half-drunk the day before.

"The rest was simple--dropping the lavalliere links back of Number
Five, placing the lavalliere in the yard of his house, and so on.

"I had one piece of luck which, of course, I did not count on when I
first adopted this simple course. That was when Greenleaf asked me
to help him in finding the murderer. A confiding soul-your
Greenleaf--and insured by nature against brain storms.

"Such a turn was a godsend. I had become the investigator of my own
crime.

"There remains to be told only the fact that I made a second trip to
Number Five.

"Having come back here in safety, I perceived I had left there without
the jewels she was wearing and without those in her jewel cabinet.

"She had brought this cabinet into the living room to show me how her
supply of jewelry had been depleted.

"To murder and not get the fruits of it, is like picking one's own
pocket. I returned immediately and rectified the mistake.

"Before departing this last time, I switched on the lights to assure
myself that I had left only the clue to the negro's presence, none to
my own.

"That explains Withers' story of his struggle at the foot of the steps.
We really had it.

"In the ordinary course of events, the negro would have gone to the
chair.

"But there were complications I did not